WENDY MURPHY: The mystery of what happened to the Malaysian flight is no mystery

Saturday

Mar 29, 2014 at 3:00 AM

By Wendy Murphy

COMMENTARY – The mystery of what happened to the missing Malaysian airplane is only confusing if you watch cable news and listen to the “aviation experts” purporting to “explain” things and answer all our questions. It’s a lot clearer if you ignore the expert speculation about absurd theories and simply use common sense to deduce that the plane was obviously intentionally flown to its watery grave by someone with an agenda.
Though motives remain unclear, the act was clearly intentional and malicious. And it doesn’t really matter whether the malice comes from radical Islam or someone on the verge of losing his job or getting divorced, etc. It would be nice to know answers to all the whys, but for now it’s enough to know that it was an intentional act of mass murder by a person or persons will a well-oiled plan.

That it was ever considered a mechanical failure is ridiculous, at least from the moment it was revealed that the plane took a sharp left turn in the sky halfway between Malaysia and China. If the turn were the result of a mechanical failure such as a fire or smoke in the cockpit it would have been communicated somehow – if not by radio from one of the pilots than by one of the many radar/satellite alternatives that allow planes to “speak” to air traffic controllers and/or other pilots in the air at the time.

A plane with a problem serious enough to merit a sharp left turn in the sky would not have failed to communicate in some fashion, especially considering that there was ample time for communication after the famous “all right – good night” statement was made just as the place left Malaysian airspace and entered Chinese airspace. (There’s always a lot of overlap in these airspace borders, so China should have already been communicating with the plane when the pilot said “good night” to Malaysia but Chinese officials aren’t saying much.)

Despite the extremely suspicious circumstance of the plane’s sharp left turn, analysts continued to speculate that mechanical failure or a fire was to blame and that “anything was possible.” That claim was nutty. They should have said, “considering that the plane didn’t crash moments after it turned around, it’s a little too coincidental that a plane just happens to bang a left in the sky just as it’s leaving Malaysian airspace and right before it switches to Chinese airspace – at exactly the same time that the transponder system is turned off – and right when confusion over which country was supposed to be paying attention would make the suspicious actions harder to detect such that the plane had more time to fly, undetected, to the desolate South Indian Ocean.”

Few analysts stated the obvious even though an idiot would know that the best dumping ground for a monstrously huge 777 jet is an isolated area in the southern Indian Ocean.

That there was so much conflicting information in the beginning could have been the result of an unsophisticated Malaysian government trying to make sense of something it lacked skills to assess, or it was simply that the jet-napper was far more sophisticated than the smartest Malaysian officials. It’s also possible that people at very high levels in many countries knew much more than they were saying from day one.

While we don’t all have to know the specifics about exactly who may have had a motive to destroy the plane, its passengers or its cargo, the families of the dead passengers had a right and a need to know much sooner than they did that there was virtually no hope anyone would be found alive. Making families suffer through protracted guessing games from experts who knew more but kept saying “we can’t rule anything out” was a form of torture.

Lawsuits will soon be filed with families demanding answers they may never get, while the public continues to click helplessly across cable news shows hoping to hear why the incident happened, who was responsible, what the “black box” tells us and whether data that was erased from the pilot’s home flight simulator can be retrieved.

My money’s on the story going away fast because no matter what the truth is, nobody will come out of this ugly mess looking good.

Wendy Murphy is adjunct professor of law at New England Law|Boston and a well-known television legal analyst. A former prosecutor, Murphy specializes in the representation of crime victims in civil and criminal litigation. Her first book “And Justice For Some” was published in 2007 and was released in paperback in 2013. Read more of her columns at wendymurphylaw.com.